A Bad Attitude: A Novel from the Vietnam War

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What Breed of Liberal I Am

My Liberal Identity:

You are a New Left Hipster, also known as a MoveOn.org liberal, Netroots activist, or Daily Show fanatic. You believe that if we really want to defend American values, conservative hatriots must be exposed and mocked for every fanatical, puritanical, soulless, paranoid, fact-free, obstructionist ideal for which they stand.

More Quotations

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

-- Henry Kissinger

"When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist."

-- Archbishop Helder Camara

"It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

-- Voltaire

"If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything."

-- Malcolm X

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause."

-- Eric Hoffer

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying a cross."

-- Sinclair Lewis

"Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people."

-- Adolph Hitler

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote -- where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference -- and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."

-- President John F. Kennedy

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin."

-- Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine, 1615,during the trial of Galileo

"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely-powerful infinitely-knowledgeable universe-spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life."

-- Andrew Lias

"When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life."

-- Sigmund Freud

"All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance."

-- Samuel Johnson

"Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither and will lose both."

-- Benjamin Franklin

"It is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, or speech, of writing, or of religion, as if they were so many rights that nature has given to man."

-- Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846)

"There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blasts of tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us."

Support Free Speech

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Since I tend to focus on the social side of politics, I tend to ignore stories such as this, but this one really caught my attention.

The Aral Sea (which used to be the answer to the question, "What is the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world?") has now shrunk to ten percent of its former size, as these satellite photos so shockingly demonstrate:

So what's happened? Short answer: Global Warming. A combination of hotter summers and drier air speeding evaporation and the short-sighted petty jealousies between some 'Stans (in this case Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) which has so far impeded any thoughts as to how to restore water to the lake has resulted in the death of untold number of fish -- as well as a formerly-thriving fishing industry -- in the lake.

So go ahead, you wingnut anti-climate-change fundo Xian low IQ proponents of, in the word of Oklahoma Senator James I'm-a-Moron-AND-I-Play-One-in-Congress Inhofe, "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" (not to Inhofe: I think that honor belongs to you personally, sir), try to deny this proof.

I can just imagine. The photos are faked, the satellite is government-owned, the picture is actually of a mud puddle, etc etc etc).

And lest you fall into the trap of "it's one of the 'Stans, it doesn't affect me", you should consider this: A large part of our domestic fruit and vegetable consumption comes from California, and the California water system is already shaky. Fresh water that should be going onto the fields is being diverted by those long concrete rivers you see as you drive down I-5. It's going to the greater LA area, where it is used to water ... the lawns of the wealthy.

Let's not forget history: Owens Lake was full of water until 1924, when a fraudulent scheme ended up grabbing the water from the Owens River that fed the lake and pipelining it off to Los Angeles.

This scheme BTW was brilliantly illustrated in the great 1974 film Chinatown.

2 Comments:

Found this on Wikipedia, for what it's worth. Looks like this was an engineering problem (probably by the Soviet/Russian variety of Republicans) rather than the result of global warming/climate change.

Jay in N.C.

"Once among the four largest lakes of the world with an area of 68,000 square kilometres (26,000 sq mi), the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet Union irrigation projects. By 2007 it had declined to 10% of its original size, splitting into three lakes[2] – the North Aral Sea and the eastern and western basins of the once far larger South Aral Sea. By 2009, the south-eastern lake had disappeared and the south-western lake retreated to a thin strip at the extreme west of the former southern sea."